Recently, a survey of
eleven countries found that Singapore office
workers were the least productive of the lot. So paiseh! But not at
all surprising.

Every Singaporean employee is used to the
sight of coworkers fiddling away on their smartphones all day as
they sit around at the office till late at night so the boss thinks
they’re working late.

Here are four ways employers and managers can
give their workers a kick in the butt and raise their
productivity.

Stop emphasising face
time

Singapore employers tend to fear that if they
don’t insist their workers sit under their noses all day, every
day, these employees will start taking advantage of their largesse
and start slacking off.

Little do they know, it is this emphasis on
face time that causes the low productivity levels. When workers are
forced to sit at the office till late at night no matter how
efficiently they do their work, you can bet they’ll try to be as
inefficient as possible. What’s the point in doing your work more
efficiently when you still need to stay late?

Start rewarding
efficiency

On the flipside, workers who are actually
efficient and manage to leave the office on time are often
penalised. We’ve all met bosses who frown upon leaving on time as
being lazy.

Even worse, there are bosses who respond by
heaping more work on their efficient employees, so these people end
up leaving as late as everyone else, after having done twice the
amount of work.

Companies need to reward efficiency instead of
penalise it if they want a workforce that’s doing actual work,
rather than just sitting around waiting for the boss to leave. One
of the biggest ways to do this is to allow employees to leave once
they’ve finished their assigned tasks. You can be sure nobody will
be sitting around surfing Facebook when it eats directly into their
personal time.

Reduce administrative and repetitive
tasks

The survey revealed that employees only spend
60% of their time on their main work duties—ie. the work they were
actually hired for. By contrast, they spend an average of 380 hours
a year doing repetitive or administrative tasks, equivalent to a
whopping two months of work.

There are bosses that create gratuitous,
pointless busy-work for their clients. One employer a friend worked
for insisted that they fill out a table accounting for every single
piece of paper that was printed out, and submit this at the end of
every working day.

In addition, many employees complain about
being forced to attend useless, unproductive meetings that distract
them from their actual work. Despite the fact that so many
employees find these meetings a waste of time, bosses don’t seem to
welcome the feedback and do nothing to reduce the administrative
workload.

Don’t be penny wise, pound
foolish

For instance, I have lawyer friends who
complain that their bosses refuse to hire a secretary to save
money, which means that these lawyers are spending hours every day
photocopying documents and doing admin.

That’s just dumb, because it would be much
cheaper for the firms to simply hire an administrative assistant or
two than to constantly have to retrain rookie lawyers who leave
because they don’t want to spend their entire career standing in
front of the photocopying machine till 10pm.

Employers need to take employee welfare and
career aspirations into account when allocating tasks to workers.
Cutting corners by refusing to get the admin support your company
needs or not wanting to update your processes and technology can
cost you more greatly in the long run, in the form of a high
turnover rate and compromised quality of work.